Skipping Without Ropes
I will, I will skip without your rope
Since you say I should not, I cannot
Borrow your son’s skipping rope to
Exercise my limbs; I will skip without
Your rope as you say, even the lace
I want will hang my neck until I die;
I will create my own rope, my own
Hope and skip without your rope as
You insist I do not require to stretch
My limbs fixed by these fevers of your
Reeking sweat and your prison walls;
I will, will skip with my forged hope;
Watch, watch me skip without your
Rope; watch me skip with my hope –
A-one, a-two, a-three, a-four, a-five
I will, a-seven, I do, will skip, a-ten,
Eleven, I will skip without, will skip
Within and skip I do without your
Rope but with my hope; and I will,
Will always skip you dull, will skip
Your silly rules, skip your filthy walls,
You weevil pigeon peas, skip your
Scorpions, skip your Excellency Life
Glory. I do, you don’t, I can, you can’t,
I will, you won’t, I see, you don’t, I
Sweat, you don’t, I will, will wipe my
Gluey brow then wipe you at a stroke
I will, will wipe your horrid, stinking,
Vulgar prison rules, will wipe you all
Then hop about, hop about my cell, my
Home, the mountains, my globe as your
Sparrow hops about your prison yard
Without your hope, without your rope,
I swear, I will skip without your rope, I
Declare, I will have you take me to your
Showers to bathe me where I can resist
This singing child you want to shape me,
I’ll fight your rope, your rules, your hope
As your sparrow does under your super-
vision! Guards! Take us for a shower!
****
When his collection Beasts of Kalunga was shortlisted for a Forward prize in 2007, the Malawian poet Jack Mapanje was interviewed by the Guardian. An outspoken critic of the authoritarian regime of Hastings Banda, Mapanje was arrested and detained in Mukuyu jail, without charge or trial, for a little over three and a half years. The Guardian article concludes with the pact he made with his fellow political prisoners which contains this excellent advice: “Victory for you is first survival. Second, if you have the opportunity, tell your story.”
Mapanje has continued to tell his story in the poems of more recent collections – including some happier narratives from his current life in the UK. A senior lecturer at the Newcastle University, he published Greetings from Grandpa in 2016. Skipping Without Ropes comes from the collection of that title, first published in 1998. It’s one of the many prison poems included in The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New and Selected Poems.
Poems in jail had to be memorised rather than written down, and Skipping Without Ropes reflects this process of composition. It is not simply repetitive, but accumulates energy and rage. Jumping, with or without rope, is an activity dependent on resistance to gravity. The hard ground under the bouncing soles of Mapanje’s poem is the prison yard, and under that, the political system. The plural of the title proclaims the breadth of its reach.
Mapanje doesn’t spare much time on the backstory: he’s in performative mode. “I will, I will skip without your rope / Since you say I should not, I cannot / Borrow your son’s skipping rope.” Even so, he tells us something significant about the moment of disempowerment. The speaker isn’t permitted the briefest respite of a period of exercise involving a change of status. He isn’t allowed a child’s toy: he isn’t allowed to be his country’s son – not even a surrogate son.
The second stanza reveals that he has earlier asked for a “lace” – presumably a shoelace – and that request, too, has been refused. The humiliations are small in the context of the imprisonment, but toxic: they sting the speaker into rage. But it’s not only rage: “I will create my own rope, my own / Hope and skip without your rope.” The rope doesn’t have to be the noose of a self-hanging. It produces a “forged hope” in stanza three, then, again, simply a hope (“I do without your / Rope but with my hope”). The mind resists, the will insists, and the hope comes into being.
You can hear the speaker’s feet pounding the concrete as he counts jumps, and, in jolting line breaks such as those after “your” (stanzas five and six), gasps of breathlessness. He simultaneously works up a sweat and his contempt. Physical disgust at the prison food (“weevil pigeon peas”) sparks off moral disgust at the self-aggrandisement of the tyrant – “your Excellency Life / Glory”.
Although a powerful performance on the page, the poem needs to be heard. Describing the kinds of mental torture inflicted on the prisoners, Mapanje leaves you in a better position to appreciate the images in stanza two. Notice also how his voice changes at the end of the poem, when he demands “Guards! Take us for a shower!” The exclamation marks in might suggest a joke or a taunt. It’s neither, as you’ll hear.
Political progress, the poem reminds us, is not by polite invitation: there’s no outstretched hand from authority, no sharing of rope by the prison guards. It has to be conjured up, energised, and repeatedly re-energised, from the mind and body of the activist. Skipping with the imagined rope, Jack Mapanje, as man and poet, makes a creative force of anger that sounds through the world’s many starless nights.
Skipping Without Ropes appears in The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2004).